Maverick Meerkat's Personal Cloud for Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows

Some day, if my vision comes to fruition, you will not have to download samba on Ubuntu to share files and separately crank up the cloud backup stuff, and then manually set the stuff that can be shared. There will be a seamless technology that allows people to share, collaborate, etc on their favorite platforms and make updates and backups without having to be a web or Linux guru. Until that day Ubuntu continues to deliver what we need.

Brilliant idea.

When do you plan to bring your vision to fruition for the rest of us?

Since web 2.0 is an advertising buzzword as it's the same internet as 1.0 I'd say never. As to the rest, that ubuntu doesnt ship with Samba nor autoconfigure it, I'd say blame your choice of distro.

@ azernoth

Well, even the distros that DO auto-install/configure Samba usually run better with a manual edit of the config file...

The GUI tools to configure it are usually 2nd rate, the default settings are usually crappy,... to do what you really want to do usually takes a text editor and a little googling to the un-initiated.

As far as seamless technologies to do that sharing stuff,... I'm thinking a bash script, maybe a hardware detection app (like the various bluetooth ones) and maybe some cron jobs ought to do it just fine. The tech is already here. There's nothing new about event driven actions on a computer...

Here's something from 2007... http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/18684.html

One useful app is called bluemon (bluemon-client, etc.). With it, you can activate and deactive programs based on bluetooth signal strength (like a script do run a backup to a Samba server, for instance).

The Red Hat graphical samba configuration tool works reasonably well. For someone who is a home user, not a systems administrator, I think they can do a pretty good job with it. That includes Fedora users, of course.

I agree that an optimal samba configuration for a sophisticated network is not something Joe or Jane Sixpack user is going to do. That does require taking a text editor to the conf file. Whether that is really needed for a typical home network or small office network is something I really question.